Modi government tells parliament ASI ran 121 archaeological projects in five years

On 20 July 2026, India's Minister of State for Culture told the Rajya Sabha that the Archaeological Survey of India had completed 121 archaeological projects across the country over the last five financial years. The number, given in a written parliamentary reply, is the most current public accounting of the agency's fieldwork programme and the first to span the full second term of the Narendra Modi government.

That headline figure is less interesting than what sits beneath it. Project counts, monuments under protection, and excavations sanctioned are the routine currency of Indian archaeological bureaucracy, but they also map, with reasonable precision, where the state has decided the past matters this decade.

What 121 projects actually looks like

The reply, reported by The Print on 20 July 2026 from the upper house, did not enumerate each project by name. It confirmed the cumulative count across excavations, conservation, epigraphic surveys, and site-development works carried out or supervised by the ASI under the Ministry of Culture. The five-year window covers financial years 2021-22 through 2025-26.

The agency is the custodian of more than 3,600 protected monuments and sites under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act. Its annual project list has expanded as the Modi government has framed archaeology as soft-power infrastructure, pairing site conservation with tourism circuits and heritage walks in cities from Varanasi to Ahmedabad.

The 121 figure is consistent with the agency's own annual reports, which have typically logged between 20 and 30 active field projects per year, with conservation and survey work layered on top. The Print's reporting on the parliamentary reply did not break out the split between excavations and non-excavation works, and the minister's text is the primary public record for the cumulative number.

The framing inside the figure

Government communications around the ASI in this period have leaned into two registers: site-as-spectacle, with Taj Mahal corridor projects and Mahakal Lok-style precinct revamps marketed domestically, and site-as-civilisational-claim, with new research emphasis on Indus Valley sites, Buddhist circuits along the Northeast frontier, and temple archaeology in the southern states.

That dual framing matters because project counts, in the Indian context, are not just accounting. Each sanctioned excavation is an institutional decision about which period, which dynasty, which material culture gets the resources of the state. The ASI's project list over the last five years, weighted toward early-historic and medieval temple complexes, tracks closely with the cultural priorities the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has signalled in its successive culture ministry budgets.

Critics have noted, in separate reporting outside this thread, that the agency's appetite for sites associated with Hindu temple traditions and ancient urban planning has grown visibly relative to Mughal-era conservation, though the parliamentary reply itself makes no such distinction.

What the sources do not say

A few important caveats apply. The parliamentary reply, as quoted by The Print on 20 July 2026, gives the headline number of 121 projects without itemising them, so the regional and period distribution cannot be reconstructed from this disclosure alone. The original question, the minister's full statement, and any appended annexures would clarify the count, but the available source is the press account, not the parliamentary record itself.

Second, the figure does not capture projects funded or executed by state archaeology departments, several of which run independent excavations in tandem with the ASI. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, for example, maintain their own directorates that operate outside the central count. The 121 figure therefore describes the central agency's footprint, not the country's full archaeological effort.

Third, project completion and project quality are not the same metric. Indian archaeology has long faced criticism that conservation outputs lag behind sanctioned works, with monsoon damage, encroachment, and chronic understaffing eating into field seasons. The parliamentary reply does not address completion rates or peer-reviewed outputs.

Stakes and what to watch

The practical stakes are modest but real. ASI projects feed directly into the tourism economy around heritage sites, into the placement of museum collections, and into the textbook record of how India's past is taught in state-affiliated institutions. A count of 121 projects across five years is, by global standards, a substantial fieldwork portfolio for a single national agency; by domestic standards, it is roughly consistent with the agency's recent tempo, suggesting continuity rather than a step-change.

Two near-term indicators will tell readers more than the headline number. The first is the next ASI annual report, which historically itemises excavations by site and gives scholars a working list of where the agency is putting shovels. The second is the culture ministry's budget for 2026-27, due with the Union budget cycle, which will signal whether the second-term momentum is sustained into the government's final years. If the figure holds or rises while Mughal-era conservation budgets remain flat, the pattern will harden; if both rise, the story is one of genuine expansion rather than rebalancing.

For now, the parliamentary reply is the cleanest public confirmation that the ASI's fieldwork machinery has run at pace through the Modi government's second term. The number itself is the news. What it tells you about priorities is the subtext, and the source material, taken on its own, supports the count but not the subtext.

How Monexus framed this: the wire led with a parliamentary statistic. This piece treats the statistic as a window onto which past the Indian state is choosing to fund, with the caveats that a single reply cannot carry the full analytical weight.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeological_Survey_of_India
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Monuments_and_Archaeological_Sites_and_Remains_Act
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Culture_(India)